Friday, September 14. 2007

I have been following the price of wheat with interest noticing that it has been shooting up and now I see a story in the Gazette about it. Nine dollars a bushel for wheat. That's a lot of money. Is it enough? That I'm not to sure about.

My dad raised wheat for a lot of years out here and he would be real excited to see these kinds of prices. The prices have been so low lately i got out of wheat and even with these prices i am not tempted to get back into it. Hell, the cost of the equipment itself to try to get back into it efficiently would preclude me from doing it let alone trying to get the fields ready.

All the fields my dad farmed were leased. I tried to come to arrangements with the owners about planting the fields down to grass or something but they never would let me so all they are now is weed patches that haven'
t been tilled or taken care of in years. In fact, I have leases on all of them again but as grazing leases for a lot less money than farm leases are worth. The cows really seem to enjoy the weed patches and it gives me extra grazing which is always useful.

The owners of one of the chunks have been shopping it around trying to find someone, anyone willing to farm it and pay farm ground rates for it. They have been unsuccessful. One guy contacted me about it but when I told him the state the land was in with weeds and all he was not interested.

Some of the ground I just finished planting down to grass could be suitable for wheat but I don't want to go there. I've heard more than one guy recently talking about plowing up hay ground or other ground they have to plant wheat with prices the way they are. I personally bet by this time next year wheat prices will be under 5 dollars per bushel. It is way to easy for people to switch to wheat production from other crops they might have and to really grow a bumper crop. I think that is what is going to happen.

Here in Montana, for instances, there has been a lot of growers trying different things like canola or peas, trying to make money while wheat was cheap. Now that wheat has spiked up I bet that the majority of those producers that have been trying alternative crops jump back into wheat because of the price spike. These kinds of decisions are going to be happening all over the US and the world so wheat prices will be driven back down fairly quickly. This is what happened in the early 70's and its what is going to happen now, at least in my opinion.

The present price isn't high enough for it to be worth it to me to get in. Kudos though to those guys who are still growing wheat and reaping the prices. They deserve it. They have been struggling with low prices for a lot of years and deserve this spike in price to help them out. I don't think it will be as high next year but it will be interesting to see.

On a grassroots level we say that man can touch more than he can grasp. Gabriel Marcel